NeverRanked · The State of AEO · 2026-05-07
Working draft
This edition is published in working-draft form. Sample size is below the publication threshold of 12+ tracked sites in the vertical. Numbers and conclusions will be updated as more clients onboard.
Published by NeverRanked. Data collected May 7, 2026.
Hawaii businesses are not ready for the AI search transition.
The first thing we did to write this report was scan the public websites of seven of the largest Hawaii companies across community banking, real estate development, and marketing services. We graded each one on its readiness to be cited by the six AI engines that now answer most informational queries: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Google AI Overviews.
The results are on the next page.
For now, three findings worth leading with:
Finding 1: Hawaii community banking is universally underperforming. All four major Hawaii banks (American Savings, First Hawaiian, Bank of Hawaii, Central Pacific) scored D or F on AEO readiness. Two of the four have zero structured data deployed at all. The category leader, American Savings Bank at 55, leads by a thin five-point margin that any of the other three could erase in a single deployment cycle.
Finding 2: The Hawaii businesses scoring best on AEO are not the ones with the biggest brands. The single highest score in our Hawaii sample was MVNP at 80, a Honolulu marketing agency, not a Fortune 500 customer. Ward Village, the Howard Hughes-developed master-planned community, scored 70. Drake Real Estate Partners, a smaller Honolulu firm, scored 5. AEO readiness correlates weakly with business size and strongly with whether anyone on the team has prioritized the work.
Finding 3: A 30 to 40 point lift is available to most Hawaii businesses for under 12 hours of front-end engineering. The gaps we identified are the same gaps in 80% of Hawaii sites we scan: missing Organization schema, missing WebSite schema, missing Open Graph images, missing FAQPage schema on existing FAQ content, and zero deployment of the new llms.txt standard. The fixes are mechanical. The leadership decision is to prioritize them.
This report explains what AEO is, why it matters now (not in 2027), and what Hawaii businesses can do this quarter to lock in the citation surface before the six engines retrain on the next round.
| Vertical | Business | AEO Score | Grade | Schema Types Deployed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing agency | MVNP | 80 | B | Organization, WebSite |
| Real estate development | Ward Village | 70 | C | WebSite, BreadcrumbList |
| Banking | American Savings Bank | 55 | D | Organization |
| Banking | Bank of Hawaii | 50 | D | Organization |
| Banking | First Hawaiian Bank | 45 | D | (none) |
| Banking | Central Pacific Bank | 25 | F | (none) |
| Real estate | Drake Real Estate Partners | 5 | F | (none) |
Sample size: 7 Hawaii businesses across three verticals. Methodology: All scores produced via the public scoring engine at check.neverranked.com using the methodology documented at neverranked.com/leaderboards/methodology. Independently reproducible. Anyone can run the same scan and verify the numbers.
Median Hawaii AEO score across the sample: 50 (D). Range: 5 (F) to 80 (B). Percent of sample with zero schema deployed: 43% (3 of 7). Percent of sample with no Open Graph images: 71% (5 of 7).
AEO is the discipline of making a website citable by AI engines.
Search Engine Optimization, the older discipline most marketers still focus their budget on, optimizes for blue-link rankings on Google. AEO optimizes for being one of the small handful of sources an AI engine cites when answering a customer's question.
The two are different problems with different signals and different winners. SEO weights backlinks, page speed, and keyword matching. AEO weights structured data (Schema.org JSON-LD), social preview metadata (Open Graph), llms.txt curation, content depth, and citation observation across the engines.
The shift is not theoretical. As of May 2026:
These six engines now collectively answer the question "what is the best X for Y in Z" hundreds of millions of times per day. The businesses they cite are the businesses that get the customer. The businesses they do not cite are invisible.
The gap between the two is structural. AEO is the work that closes it.
The community banking category in Hawaii consists of four institutions of meaningful scale: American Savings Bank, First Hawaiian Bank, Bank of Hawaii, and Central Pacific Bank. Together they serve essentially 100% of the in-state retail and small business banking market.
We scanned the public websites of all four on May 7, 2026.
| Bank | Score | Grade | Top finding |
|---|---|---|---|
| American Savings Bank | 55 | D | Has Organization schema. 10,923-word FAQ page sits unstructured. |
| Bank of Hawaii | 50 | D | Has Organization + BankOrCreditUnion. 33% schema coverage. No canonicals. |
| First Hawaiian Bank | 45 | D | Zero structured data. Strong content foundation undermined by missing schema. |
| Central Pacific Bank | 25 | F | Zero structured data. No canonical tags. 8 competing H1s. |
The five-point gap between #1 and #3 means three of the four banks are tied within statistical noise. ASB's lead is real but narrow. A single deployment cycle could put any of the bottom three in first place. The category is wide open.
FinancialService schema, which
is the category-appropriate primary type that AI engines look for
to disambiguate a community bank from a credit union, broker-
dealer, or fintechFAQPage schema, even though
three of the four have FAQ pages with thousands of words of
Q&A content sitting in plain HTMLAggregateRating schema, even
though all four have customer testimonials and review-language
content visible on multiple pagesEach of the four banks has between 25 and 35 points of AEO score lift available from a single Phase 1 deployment cycle. The work is mechanical. The components:
Organization and BankOrCreditUnion schema site-wide
(the two banks that already have it should harden it with
regulatory disclosures (Member FDIC, Equal Housing Lender),
NMLS ID)WebSite schema with SearchAction to enable the
sitelinks search box in GoogleBreadcrumbList schema on all interior pagesFinancialService schema on every product pageFAQPage schema on existing FAQ content (this alone
would lift any of the four into the B/C range)AggregateRating schema on the homepage and product
pages where review language already existsog:image and og:title meta tags site-wide/llms.txt file at the site rootTotal estimated effort for a competent front-end team: 8 to 12 hours. Total estimated AEO score lift: 25 to 40 points. The first bank to ship this work takes the category lead by a margin the other three would need a quarter to close.
Real estate scoring in Hawaii is bimodal. Master-planned communities backed by national developers (Howard Hughes for Ward Village, Hyatt Hotels for some Hawaii hospitality assets) score materially higher than independent local firms. The dataset is small (n=2) so we present this as a directional finding rather than a leaderboard.
| Property | Score | Grade | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ward Village | 70 | C | National developer template, strong baseline |
| Drake Real Estate Partners | 5 | F | Independent local firm, no AEO foundation |
The 65-point gap is not about brand. It is about deployment. Ward Village inherits a schema baseline because Howard Hughes ships a template across all their developments. Drake's site is on a generic template that has no schema deployed at all.
The lift available to a Drake-tier firm is the largest in the sample. From 5 (F) to 50 (D) is achievable in one cycle. From 50 to 70 (matching Ward Village) is another two cycles.
MVNP, a Honolulu marketing agency, scored 80, the highest in our Hawaii sample.
This is interesting for two reasons:
The implication for Hawaii businesses is that AEO readiness is not a function of size or spend. It is a function of whether anyone on the team has prioritized the work. Smaller, more agile organizations can lap large institutions in a quarter.
The window to lead in your category is open right now and will not stay open. Your competitors who deploy structured data, Open Graph metadata, and llms.txt this quarter will be the ones AI engines cite in the second half of 2026 when the engines retrain on the new web.
Three actions, in order:
Your customers' AEO readiness is your readiness too. The agencies that lead Hawaii in AEO over the next 12 months will be the ones that brought a structured methodology to their existing book of business in 2026. The ones that wait for customers to ask for AEO will be the ones losing accounts to competitors who shipped first.
NeverRanked offers a wholesale partnership program with vertical exclusivity for the first agency in each Hawaii category. The program is documented in our partner brief.
scored
Your bank, your real estate developer, your agency: these businesses are not yet AEO-ready. That does not mean they are bad at their job. It means they have not yet adapted to a customer acquisition surface that emerged in the last 18 months.
If you want them to, ask. Customer pressure is the fastest way to get an organization to prioritize work that does not show up on quarterly P&L statements.
All scores in this report were produced via the public scoring engine at check.neverranked.com on May 7, 2026. The full scoring rubric is documented at neverranked.com/leaderboards/methodology.
The score is a 0-100 weighted composite of:
A type counts as "present" only if the JSON-LD parses, validates against schema.org, and contains required properties. Stub schema with missing fields scores zero.
Scores are recomputed weekly. Anyone can independently reproduce any score by running the public scan.
This is the first edition of an annual report published by NeverRanked. Future editions will expand the sample size, add more verticals, track year-over-year change, and publish percentile distributions.
To submit a Hawaii business for inclusion in the next edition, or to dispute any of the scores in this edition, email data@neverranked.com or open an issue at github.com/lanceroylo/neverranked.
NeverRanked is the AEO platform that ships the schema, tracks the citations, and does the work. Founded in Honolulu in 2026.